I remember when I was afraid to spend more than $20 to build and grow my business.

For the first couple of years, my only business expense was Squarespace -- my website and hosting.

That was it. No fancy software. Nada.

Then I went from one extreme to another...from being afraid to spend any money to spending way too much.

There was a time (like a couple of months ago lol) where my business expenses were well over $600.

This was madness because most months I wasn't bringing in enough money to justify it.

Even though I don't believe in spending thousands of dollars to start your business, I do feel you need certain pieces of software to save you money and time.

These days, I try to minimize my business expenses and have figured out a way to use one piece of software for multiple functions.

For example, I use Leadpages to collect emails, host webinars, make sales pages, collect payments, and deliver products.

I'm all about making life easier, so here are the seven tools I use to run my business.

Seven tools...

1.Squarespace - I've been using Squarespace for years. I started off with a free site on Wordpress, but Squarespace is more of my speed. It's easy to use (I'm not tech savvy), affordable, and their tech support is top notch. They used to make mini tutorials back in the day. I told you I'm not tech savvy. lol

2. Teachable - I use Teachable to host my course. I love how user-friendly the software is, and how it organizes content in a way that is easy for customers to consume.

3.Acuity Scheduling & Calendly- I use free accounts (Acuity came free with my Squarespace account) for both of these businesses to schedule business consults and podcast interviews. There's no need to go back and forth with guests or potential clients when all you have to do is link them to your calendar to schedule appointment. The more hands off the better!

4.Leadpages - I use this software to set up opt-in pages (to get folks to join my email list -- like this page), host webinars, make sales pages (like this one), collect payments, and deliver products.

5. Libsyn - I use this software to host my Brown Vegan and This Biz Life podcast episodes.

6. Convertkit- I started off with Mailchimp, but Convertkit is amazing for building my email list and automation. For example, when someone signs up for a course on Teachable, I set up automation to send them a welcome email. Like I said above, the less hands off I can be the better. Plus, you can't beat giving your customers a better experience.

7.Wavve - You already know how much I believe video is important for building and growing an online business. I love using this software to share snippets of my podcast episodes on social media to get listeners to click over to Apple podcasts or my website to listen to the full episode.

Listen to the interview for the first time to see how it flowed, to edit out dead air, interruptions, etc.

Listen again in a few hours (or days) to edit out most "umms," jots down notes for the blog post, and to get a 30-second snippet for social media. This edit usually takes the longest to do.

If it feels like the episode didn't flow well, I will listen a third time. It’s very rare for me to listen to an interview more than twice tho.

Once the interview portion of the episode is done, I save it to my desktop and then record my introduction using a Yeti microphone and Audacity.

I edit my introduction (this is usually 3-5 mins of audio), then put all the footage together in Audacity & save to the desktop. This footage includes: my introduction, interview, music, pre-recorded outro, advertisements, etc.

Quick final edit...to make sure I didn’t make any mistakes while putting all the clips together (I don't listen straight through)

Once the episode is ready, I upload the final mp3 file to Libsyn (my podcast host)